Nikolay Bobrikov

Nikolay Bobrikov (27 January 1839-17 June 1904) was Governor-General of Finland under the Russian Empire from 1898 to 1904, succeeding Frederick Heiden and preceding Ivan Mikhailovich Obolensky.

Biography
Nikolay Bobrikov was born on 27 January 1839 in St. Petersburg, Russian Empire, and he entered the Imperial Russian Army in 1858, serving as a divisional chief in Novgorod. In 1869, he became a colonel, and he became a Major-General in 1878 and Governor-General of Finland in 1898. Bobrikov was hated by the Finns for suppressing their desire for independence, and he ordered that all correspondence was to be written in Russian and that Russian was to become the primary language of Finland. In 1901, Finnish troops were forced to serve in the Imperial Russian Army instead of the autonomous Finnish military, but conscription was abolished in 1905 after the Russians decided that the Finns were unreliable. In 1903, he was given dictatorial powers by Czar Nicholas II of Russia, giving him the power to dismiss government officials and to censor newspapers. On 16 June 1904, SR revolutionary Eugen Schauman shot Bobrikov three times before killing himself, a major assassination linked to the 1905 Russian Revolution.